A few years ago, Team Ninja dug deep into the 1980s to resurrect the
Ninja Gaiden series of side-scrollers. Revamping the concept for
the Xbox, they emerged with something great: 2004’s Ninja Gaiden was gorgeous, thrilling, and epic—an action game that boasted
vicious battles, finely tuned controls, and an infuriating difficulty
level that made me want to beat the shit out of my Xbox with a baseball
bat. There are challenging games, and then there are games that are
just dickish. Ninja Gaiden was the latter; I loved it… but oh,
how I hated it.
Team Ninja’s latest Ninja Gaiden game hit last week for the
DS, though, and there’s no hate here: just love. Pure, sweet, ninja-y
love. While Ninja Gaiden was so intent on being hardcore that it
forgot to be fun, Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword never stops being
an engaging, rewarding, and robust action experience.
Compared to its console brethren, Dragon Sword‘s graphics
aren’t going to win any awards—but compared to most games on the
DS, they’re flat-out beautiful, with ninja Ryu Hayabusa running and
slicing his way through some skillfully pre-rendered backgrounds. But
underneath Team Ninja’s gorgeous aesthetics lays a strong action engine
that makes it consistently enjoyable to slice and dice through
Dragon Sword‘s endless enemies (demons, dragons, bugs, ghost
piranhas, ad infinitum). (While all that ass-kicking’s fun, the
more open-ended exploration elements of 2004’s Ninja Gaiden are
missed here—over extended sessions, Dragon Sword begins to
feel too much like a slash-a-thon.)
There are a few quibbles: The boss fights are repetitive, there are
some unfortunate dealings with some lethal spikes, and, ironically, the
difficulty level might be a touch too easy. But overall, the
memorable, intense, and fast-paced Dragon Sword has all the best
parts of 2004’s Ninja Gaiden without any of the worst. There
aren’t any other action games on the DS that are this good, but there
also just aren’t that many action games that are this much fun, period.
ERIK HENRIKSEN
